Scientists Themselves Play Large Role In Bad Reporting

Hugh Pickens writes "A lot of science reporting is sensationalized nonsense, but are journalists, as a whole, really that bad at their jobs? Christie Wilcox reports that a team of French scientists have examined the language used in press releases for medical studies and found it was the scientists and their press offices that were largely to blame. As expected, they found that the media's portrayal of results was often sensationalistic. More than half of the news items they examined contained spin. But, while the researchers found a lot of over-reporting, they concluded that most of it was 'probably related to the presence of ''spin'' in conclusions of the scientific article's abstract.' It turns out that 47% of the press releases contained spin. Even more importantly, of the studies they examined, 40% of the study abstracts or conclusions did, too. When the study itself didn't contain spin to begin with, only 17% of the news items were sensationalistic, and of those, 3/4 got their hype from the press release. 'In the journal articles themselves, they found that authors spun their own results a variety of ways,' writes Wilcox. 'Most didn't acknowledge that their results were not significant or chose to focus on smaller, significant findings instead of overall non-significant ones in their abstracts and conclusions, though some contained outright inappropriate interpretations of their data.'"

This just in...media reports exciting news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whereas the mundane gets nothing. For every person murdered, or in a car accident, there are thousands in the area who had a humdrum day. For every house that burns down, thousands don't.

People who hear about these bad things and think the world is going to heck, are forgetting that nobody cares to hear about nothing happening.

Attention whoring for funding

[Rogerborg]

Fund science like you fund business, and it becomes an exercise in marketing and hot topic buzzwords.

OK, it might take more energy to make a solar panel than we'll ever get back from it, but look at the economies of scale that we're leveraging!

In other news...

[Comboman]

So basically, most reporters just regurgitate press releases rather than doing any of that actual journalism stuff. That's not unique to science/medical reporting. It happens in political reporting, business reporting, hell even sports reporting. The bad science reporting is just more obvious because it's easier to debunk.

Re:Attention whoring for funding

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who is a Ph.D. student and research assistant, "whoring for funding" is pretty much SOP. It's pathetic and I hate it.

Solar Cells, Anybody?

[Jane Q. Public]

If even 1/10 of the hype about "breakthroughs" in solar cell efficiency were actually to be combined and made real in the marketplace, we'd all be charging the utility companies now instead of the other way around.

It's only Natural

[happy_place]

There are a number of reasons scientists spin their work.

1. Science is quite boring. By nature it's supposed to be, objective, logical, and devoid of feelings. But Scientists themselves are not typically boring people, they're humans, and humans are emotional beings.

2. Scientists aren't communications experts and suck at making dry discipline accessible to the public. Never was this more obvious than when I was in college. How many brilliant researchers really sucked at teaching? Pretty much most of them.

3. Scientists want to think their work matters, and therefore are inclined to extrapolate applications of their science to the public. When those applications get reported as a sure thing, then an exaggeration is bound to happen.

4. And of course, Science that can be show to be of great public benefit gets funding. Cha-ching!

Re:It's only Natural

[jhoegl]

3 and 4 are the main reasons, 1 is subjective and 2 is outright wrong. If 2 were correct they wouldnt know how to spin things in such a way as to hide the results the way they do.
3 and 4 are the most concerning, as that is what peer review is for and that is where there is failure due to the large volumes of data vs time.
So, it is abused by those that just want money to do stupid things.

Re:It's only Natural

[rtaylor]

5. It's possible that scientists which include spin and get good news coverage receive additional funding the next year. Those who don't may not, and eventually end up an assistant to someone who does spin.

No idea if the above is true but if our carrot/stick system is setup this way but if it is then spin is guaranteed.

Re:Scapegoats

[khallow]

And those other fields also often have the same sort of collusion between the reporter and the subject. The noteworthy claim in the article is not that scientists are generating spin that journalists exaggerate, but instead that most exaggerations and errors by journalists originate in such spin.

How that claim became your above "blame the scientist", I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Attention whoring for funding

[jellomizer]

Business when done properly will have a profitable result.
Science when done properly will have either a positive or negative result.

The scientific process for the Facebook Generation...
I have this crazy idea.
How to measure if my crazy idea works.
Lets run tests that measure my crazy idea.
Does the tests match my expected results?
If (Not even close) { Your idea was really crazy, try an other one }
If (close) { Your idea may have some backing but will need to be tweaked }
if (spot on) { These results may be a fluke, try again and by different people, preferably by people who think your idea is insane }

Science is about being open to everything, only to find ways to shoot the bad idea out.

Re:Attention whoring for funding

[oh_my_080980980]

Chose another profession. As someone who was a graduate research assistant, we all knew grant writing was part of the job. You want to keep doing research then you need to apply for grants.